Countering Supernatural Claims

by Peter Tim

Of all the claims made by the major religions, supernaturalism most
requires countering. For supernaturalism is the greatest enemy of
reason. It is the negation of the principle that reason is the
necessary and sufficient — indeed, the only — tool for making sense of
the facts of existence. And if supernaturalism were true, if it were
a valid concept for understanding the real world, then the value of
reason would be doubtful in practice and worthless in the abstract.
Understanding this is key to Freethought.

“Supernatural” comes from the Latin, meaning above or beyond nature. The term — and presumably the idea of entities and forces —
“principalities and powers,” as Paul puts it in his Letter to the
Ephesians — that are beyond or above the natural world — first shows
up in the 15th Century. It took that long for the idea of an
observable world governed by “Laws of Nature” to have firmly taken
hold. Thus, the 1400’s are generally considered the beginning of the
Renaissance, the end of the Late Middle Ages and the beginning of the
Early Modern period. Christopher Columbus’ first voyages to the
Americas occurred at the end of that century. And within 300 years
the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote in his 1748 Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding, in a section “Of Miracles,” that:

“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the
testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood be more miraculous …
no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle.”

In the early 20th Century the discredited idea of supernaturalism
reappeared under a new name: “paranormalism.” For some time, by this
title, it even enjoyed something of a reputation as a subject amenable
to scientific study. This was parodied in the film Ghostbusters.
But, popular belief to the contrary, there has never been any credible
evidence for the paranormal.

Yet there remain many defenders of supernaturalism. Almost all are
theologically motivated. They justify their claims by appeals to
“holy books” and other religious authorities said to have had special
revelations. The more sophisticated combine their claims with an
attack on the rejection of supernaturalism as a supposedly arbitrary
and unproven assumption. But what is this “naturalism” they say is
unwarranted? Is it, as supernaturalists say, the claim that the
natural world is all there is?

In fairness, some who reject supernaturalism may look at it that way. But what supernaturalists call “naturalism” is simply the obvious,
that we cannot know anything unless it is of or about evidence or
perceptions of some kind. For there is nothing else to know of or
about. Thomas Jefferson expressed this in an 1820 letter to John Adams:

“When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise.” ⚡

When it comes to knowing anything about the world that we share,
about sensations — perceptions — that are observer-independent, we can
only have recourse to the same sort of perceptions. No one can
justifiably assert, on the basis of a dream or other purely subjective
experience, that they have acquired knowledge about objective reality
that can only be — or must be — accepted by others on their say-so “by
faith.” How could such assertions possibly be verified, especially
when, as is the rule with revelations from alleged deities, different
people make mutually exclusive claims? We can only say of subjective
experiences that they may carry special meaning for our subjective
understanding. But for objective understanding, the same sort of
perceptions are necessary, which is to say, objective experiences that
anyone can verify in order to reach agreed-upon conclusions.

To accept supernaturalism is to reject this analysis. It is, as
Jefferson put it, “to reason otherwise.” It is, in fact, to reject
reason. Yet no one completely rejects reason. Even supernaturalists
accept and make use of the generalizations of objective experience
with which we reason. It is only when believers come to consider
their peculiar supernatural faith-beliefs that they choose to
disregard reason. It is supernaturalists who must therefore account
for and justify their departure from reason, not “naturalists” who do
not choose to deviate from it. For if “naturalism” requires
justification, then supernaturalists’ disregard of reason in favor of
faith at whatever point they choose to do this becomes all the more
difficult. For they need both to justify their reliance on a
naturalist approach up to that point as well as their disregard of
reason after it.

Now there are two other senses in which we may think of
supernaturalism. The first is the inference that there is a reality
beyond what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called “the veil of
perception.” It is this world that Kant called “noumena” that gives
rise to our perceptions and measurements of “phenomena.” For we do
not perceive things directly with our senses. Even the machines we
use to detect what our senses cannot have their limitations. It is
as if, as the Greek philosopher Plato speculated, we perceive shadows
projected on the wall of a cave in which we are imprisoned by our
physical nature. For all we know, we are “brains in vats” being fed
all of our sensory experiences by extraterrestrial/extradimensional
beings. But we can discern no way of overcoming this handicap for
now. And there are no facts and no reason — none — to suggest that
anything or anyone from the world of “noumena” is in contact with us.

The second sense in which at least some of human experience can be
considered to surpass or transcend objective reality is that so much
of it is subjective. All of our perceptions, despite the fact that
important aspects of them are inter-subjective and therefore
independent of who is doing the perceiving, are colored by our
personal circumstances and individuality. And these become a part of
what we are. Because of this, two people may perceive the same
sense-data but are affected by it differently. This is all the more
apparent when it comes to internal sensations of many kinds and
especially of emotions connected with our families and friends, to say
nothing of our hopes and fears, expectations, ambitions and so on.
Here subjectivity dominates and the way in which we try to make sense
of these things is not as clearly connected with reasoning. Even
science can say very little about such things despite that fact that,
in principle, the doings of all the neurons in our brains could be
mapped and measured.

If there is any sort of permissible “supernaturalism” with which
religion may legitimately be concerned it is this. And it is this
fundamental insight on which Freethought as explicated by the Church
of Freethought is predicated.

⚡ This passage may put the well-read in mind of the well-known
“quotation” of Thomas Jefferson after a meteorite fall near Weston, CT
in 1807 that it was “easier to believe that two Yankee Professors
could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven” is
spurious. Jefferson never said this. On the other hand, the French
chemist — and devout Catholic — Antoine Lavoisier said of reports of
meteorite falls: “A stone cannot fall from the sky because there are
no stones in the sky!”